New Eric Clapton Is Toned Down And Tuned Up

June 24, 1985|By Steve Morse, Boston Globe

Eric Clapton had just spent five minutes complaining about life on the road. ''Life on the road is a circus,'' he said in a curt tone of dismissal. ''It's not real. It has no bearing on reality whatsoever.''

Clapton, 40, has had enough of the hollow high life of the road -- the backstage groupies, the easy availability of drugs and the constant stream of strangers telling you that you're God's gift to music.

So what makes it all still worthwhile? The stage -- as simple as that.

''I think I love the stage even more than I used to. Yes, that's absolutely true,'' said Clapton. ''It's because I'm playing with a clarity that I never had before and am treating the stage now as something real rather than just a party.''

The clarity of which he spoke has been won the hard way. Having tamed the self-destructive drug habits that began in the '60s with the band Cream, Clapton has become one of the major comeback stories of the '80s. His new album, Behind the Sun, merges blues, pop and soul in the best work he's done in a decade, while his latest tour has earned rave reviews for the confident, rejuvenated presence of its leader.

''Luck,'' said Clapton, speaking by phone last week from Toronto. ''That's how I've been able to come this far. In my twenties, I never even thought I'd live to be 30. Now I'm just grateful to be alive.''

That gratitude now has a spiritual rather than chemical focus.

''I've noticed the effect of prayer a lot more than I ever did,'' said Clapton, who considers himself a cross between a Christian and a Buddhist. ''I don't have any framework of belief -- it's really loose -- but it's based on the karmic principle. I believe that everything you do comes back to you, whether good or bad. I find that prayer, no matter how desperate or selfish it is, often does work. I resort to it quite a lot because just the idea that you're saying something that you would like to be changed with the help of God helps change your own attitude.''

The offstage Eric Clapton, who came from working-class origins as the son of a bricklayer, is today a rusticated gentleman who ''loves to fish, read and generally take it easy.''

The stories that Clapton unfolds of the old days seem almost like mythical fantasies. For example, in a recent Rolling Stone interview, he casually told of taking LSD before concerts by his landmark rock trio, Cream, which he formed after stints with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and the Yardbirds.

''Yeah, we used to do a lot of stuff like that, a lot of grass and a lot of acid. That was during the flower-power era and it seemed at that time like a perfectly normal thing to do. I mean, the audience were all doing it, so why not us? If we didn't do it, we stood out as being narcs. We were just trying to blend in, really.''

Did he feel he could play better on drugs some nights or was he just kidding himself?

''It was a kidding process,'' Clapton admitted. ''A drug-induced perception alters your state of mind to the point where a beetle walking across the floor can be of magnificent, profound importance. And if you're playing on guitar, it can sound like you're shaking the world, when, in actual fact, it's not anything other than what you would normally do. So whatever drug your mind is altered by, it is only altering your perception. It's not making you play any better or taking you to new frontiers. I think that drugs unlock a door to your psyche, which really should be done spiritually.''

As for his reckless behavior, which climaxed in growing heroin use during his subsequent tenure with the bands, Delaney & Bramlett and his own Derek & the Dominos, he said, ''I suppose I've been trying to avoid that era for quite a while, but it's crazy to think that character wasn't me, because it was. I have to integrate that period into my life.

''I'm still modest about my guitar playing. I can't just switch it on and off. Sometimes it'll be great, sometimes it won't be. I can't force it, so it's fairly humbling to know that it's not always there,'' said Clapton, whose humility extends to the way he even generously lets his two backup singers, Marcy Levy and ex-Bob Seger bandmate Shawn Murphy, each perform a song in concert. (''It's really just giving credit where credit is due. The audience deserves to see them.'')